


contagiously bright (through our sleepy eyes)

by cave_canem



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: EVERYTHING I LIKE, M/M, so you know, this is pointless and soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 07:55:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13243869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cave_canem/pseuds/cave_canem
Summary: It’s not—bad. It’s warm, and it smells like Neil, which means that it mostly smells like Andrew, because Neil doesn’t really know how to keep to his own shampoo. That small sense of familiarity is enough to counterbalance the automatic threat of the weight of another person in the bed.





	contagiously bright (through our sleepy eyes)

**Author's Note:**

> no editing we post like men
> 
> (don't hesitate to point out the typos!)

Andrew, mind and body tired, is still up smoking by the time Neil and Kevin make it back from the court, still red-faced and drenched. It’s started raining twenty minutes ago, a violent and vertical outpouring like wet cloth being twisted from the sky. Andrew doesn’t mind—despite the open window, the rain falls straight enough that he hasn’t felt a drop. And it’ll rinse the Maserati, which suffered during the dry summer to the point that Andrew had considered bringing it to wash. 

He makes a show of exhaling right when Kevin passes by the desk he’s perched on, just to see the disapproving scowl on the striker’s face. Kevin doesn’t like Andrew smoking, even less so in the dorm where the smell if not the smoke gets inside despite the open window. Andrew can understand—the smell of cold cigarette is unpleasant, and he knows Neil is already planning on having a balcony when he graduates. 

Still, there is nothing Kevin can tell him about smoking inside when he’s himself wet as a rag, and riling him up is usually satisfying, even years after. Andrew tries to concentrate on that feeling, but it glides like water on a glass pane, until there’s only that familiar _nothing_ left to feel anymore.

Andrew’s attention diverts from Kevin to Neil when he comes closer, discarding his soaked hoodie. Andrew watches him step up to the desk, bumping his hips into the edge slightly, until he is perfectly aligned with Andrew to steal the rapidly consuming cigarette from his fingers. Andrew lets him: there are more intoxicating things than the bitterness of smoke.

Neil holds the cigarette in the wasteful and slightly desperate way he always holds it: close to his face, gripped between his fingers like lifeline in the clutch of a drowning man. He doesn’t smoke out of desperation like he used to; the acrid smell isn’t only synonymous with survival anymore, but these are reflexes and feelings, learned and branded so deeply that only routine can unravel them.

Or so Bee tells him, anyway. 

“You stink,” Andrew forces himself to tell Neil instead, fingers still outstretched toward him from holding and surrendering the cigarette.

“Court’s showers are broken,” Neil says. “Kevin’s furious because he turned on cold water before we realized.”

There is movement in the bathroom, as if Kevin is grumpily banging his tall frame in their small college amenities. A second later, water cuts on. 

Andrew hums and turns his gaze to the darkness outside, leaning his head back against the window. From the light of the streetlamp standing twenty feet away, he can barely see the outline of the trees and the course of the rain. It doesn’t matter: he doesn’t need to see to know the twisting shape of the branches and the grey and red exterior of the buildings in the distance.

“Coach’s furious,” Neil says from Andrew’s right. “He’s been telling maintenance to come and check the boiler for days, now.” He pauses for a moment, turning the cigarette in his hands to shake the ash on the windowsill. “Hope they can have them fixed by Friday’s game. Brian’ll have a fit if we have to wait out post-game traffic to shower.”

He’s not deterred by Andrew’s lack of response and apparent disinterest. It’s both irritating and almost normal: Neil Josten, master at manipulating appearances, does not take people at face value. It’s either irony or natural: Andrew is too tired to think deeper about Neil’s own trauma. 

When Andrew turns his head back toward Neil, he’s not surprised to find himself being stared at. Neil’s eyes are characteristically intense. However much he dislikes them, Andrew can’t bring himself to hate them along him: their pallor is extraordinary in itself, and the fire he sees in them is often answered likewise in Andrew’s gut. 

Often. Not tonight. 

_Staring_ , Andrew wants to tell Neil, but he doesn’t have the energy to open his mouth, force his tongue to cooperate or even fully form the thought in his brain. With effort, he buries his hands in the front pocket of his oversized hoodie, and turns his face to the warm interior of the dorm. Neil dislodge the last clump of ash from the cigarette, then grounds out the butt and places it with the other three Andrew smoked this evening. 

Neil, who emptied the ashtray this morning, does the Neil’s equivalent of a worried frown, and looks at Andrew under his lashes. 

“Did you stay here all evening?” he asks. 

Andrew looks back at him steadily. He doesn’t feel like presenting the entirety of his fucked up psyche to Neil, even though, maybe _because_ ,Neil is already intimately familiar with it. It’s hard, sometimes, to be so _known_ at all times. With rare empathy, Andrew understands Neil’s struggle with the reality of his person better. 

Neil reaches around him to tug the window closed, probably interpreting the lack of answer like the ‘yes’ he expects. Andrew suppresses a shiver when a burst of wind stronger than the others blows water against his side. A few drops glide down his neck, shockingly cool. Andrew, despite his best efforts, is still bothered by the cold. 

He feels more than he sees the warmth of Neil’s hand hovering over his, and he turns his wrist slightly, so that his hand is facing upwards. Neil fits their palms together, running the coarse pad of his thumb on Andrew’s scarred knuckles. The feeling almost sends another shiver down his spine: Neil’s skin, warm and damp, is both slightly revolting and grounding. He waits for the revulsion to pass: it does, like he knew it would, because he wouldn’t have allowed it otherwise. 

They stay still in silence for several minutes, soothingly, until the bathroom fan is turned on and the door opens. Andrew can’t see Kevin from his perch on the desk, but he listens to him stepping in the bedroom, tripping on his growing pile of books next to his bed, the _tap tap_ of his nails tapping against his nightstand as he searches for the lamp switch. Neil’s thumb is never still against Andrew’s fingers, light and steady like experience taught him. 

Maybe there is something to be said for routine, and Bee was right. Andrew doesn’t doubt it: he’s acquired a taste for the control that repetition gives him in juvie, and Bee is worth far more than her already extensive accreditations. 

“You should go to bed,” Neil says when everything’s fallen quiet. “I still have to shower.”

Kevin is almost certainly already asleep by now, and unlikely to wake up when they come in, sound sleeper as he is. Andrew manages another hum, aware of the privacy Neil is offering him. He would have called it a luxury, a few years ago, but Kevin is surprisingly non intrusive and Neil knows how and when to make himself discreet. 

Besides, his is a company that Andrew never minds, as surprising as the revelation can be.

Neil drops his hand only in the bathroom, undressing himself with his usual quick efficiency as Andrew steps to the sink, toothbrush in hand. He watches Neil in the mirror, noting the curve of his back and not much else: it’s been a few years, but Neil still won’t meet his reflexion on a good day. 

“Don’t wet your hair,” Andrew says around a mouthful of toothpaste a few minutes later. The glass door of the shower doesn’t offer as much privacy as a curtain, but it certainly makes it easier to avoid a wet pillow. 

Neil, a bottle of body wash that isn’t his in hand, stops and cuts off the water. “What?”

“It’s already almost dry. Wash it tomorrow.”

“Oh, right.” 

Andrew finishes before Neil but comes back long enough to drop Neil’s sweats and the shirt he sleeps in on the closed toilet seat, before climbing up in bed. He rolls into the blanket, searching for warmth his body doesn’t really need, and closes his eyes. Andrew’s body is tired, his mind even more so, and lying there, with Neil’s scent on the pillow from the last time they shared a bed, is an improvement on everything he’s done since he woke up without the strength to move. 

He puts his back to the wall, closes his eyes, and waits. 

It doesn’t take long: Neil is quick in the bathroom, and would probably brush his teeth in the shower for maximal efficiency if Andrew let him. He closes the door of the bedroom, walking the familiar few feets to his bed in the dark with ease that Andrew watches from the comfortably high vantage. 

The few minutes have been enough for Andrew to examine himself, prodding at his mind ruthlessly and frankly. Once he’s reached a conclusion—yes—and determined his potential reaction—flinching, setback, flinging Neil off the bed during the night—, he calls, voice low: “Neil.”

Neil stops fiddling with his bed to straighten the sheets and looks up, his face clear in the ray of light coming through the blinds. 

“Yes?” he asks when he sees the bare expanse of mattress left where Andrew is pressed against the wall. 

“Yes,” Andrew says. “Bring your pillow.”

Neil dumps it on the bed with his comforter, too, because they’ve discovered the hard way that Andrew hogs the blanket, and doesn’t take too well to Neil sleepily rolling closer to him for warmth. Andrew has a new appreciation of the railing running along the length his loft bed, now. 

Neil stands on the first step of the ladder while he arranges the bed as they like, with his pillow pressed close to Andrew’s for lack of space and his comforter spread out wide on the bed. Andrew likes to roll himself into his, in what Nicky once called a blanket burrito, but Neil sleeps better unconstricted, so Andrew gets covered by another layer. 

It’s not—bad. It’s warm, and it smells like Neil, which means that it mostly smells like Andrew, because Neil doesn’t really know how to keep to his own shampoo. That small sense of familiarity is enough to counterbalance the automatic threat of the weight of another person in the bed. 

They’ve shared a bed enough times in the past years that most of the time, Andrew doesn’t feel the need to lash out. Today, his body weights too much for his skin and his thoughts threaten to drag him down every time he steps in the water. They’re not normal circumstances, and Neil’s initial insistence says how clear it is. 

The fact that he trusted Andrew with his own decision shouldn’t register like it does, but Andrew is still assuaged when he looks at Neil’s pale face and eyes under his darker mop of hair. It’s getting a little too long, and it’s still damp, leaving wet patches on Andrew’s pillow where it spread when Neil lied down. 

Neil seems content not to talk, sleepy and satisfied from playing mind-numbing Exy drills with a fellow obsessive athlete for a few hours. He’ll be rumpled and quiet tomorrow when he wakes up in the same position, because he is an extremely still sleeper, and the contrast will be enough to make Andrew want to kiss him. 

Maybe he even will. 

Andrew ponders that thought as he lets Neil fall asleep watching him. He wonders if Neil is aware that he does it, or if it’s one of his unconscious ticks. He blinks lazily, his own breathing slowing to match Neil’s, and he decides that he will kiss Neil in the morning. He wants to, after all. 

**Author's Note:**

> Andrew is unsurprisingly exhausting to write, but I hope I got him right anyway. Come talk to me at [jsteneil](http://jsteneil.tumblr.com) on tumblr!
> 
> Also, you know, kudos and comments and all that. <3


End file.
